The Biggest Threat to Legal and Important Document Storage in Toronto or Anywhere Is Humidity

Document storage in Toronto, or anywhere for that matter, requires an understanding of how dangerous a threat humidity is when storing important and legal documents.

Ever left an untreated plank or other piece of wood out in the rain? Did it swell up, warp and becoming useless? Since almost all of the paper in use today is made of wood, what do you think is going to happen if you are storing important documents in a damp and leaky basement?

Document storage in Toronto, or anywhere for that matter, requires an understanding of how dangerous a threat humidity is when storing important and legal documents.

Let’s just run through a quick list of why storing paper documents in your basement is a bad idea.

The reason untreated wood swells up, cracks, and becomes twisted and distorted, is that the plant fibers in the wood have a cellulose structure. This cellulose structure is designed to absorb water automatically; even after the plant, or tree, is dead and then cut up into parts. In simple terms: a sheet of paper is like a slow acting sponge and will soak up moisture right from the air around it.

Warm air holding a high content of water vapor settles down through your house into the much cooler basement and when this warmer, moist air cools; the humidity level of the air in the basement rises and the water vapor wants to change into a liquid form.

This drop in temperature is how clouds are created; warm air rises up thousands of feet and as it cools the dew point drops and the water vapor begins to condense into tiny droplets of liquid water.

Just the one fact mentioned above means that you can easily end up with a damp basement. It doesn’t matter if the basement is cool in temperature; what is important is the moisture content of the air.

When paper absorbs water the paper itself expands and even if you do dry it out; it will be wrinkled and crumpled and will never lay flat again.

Even a few sheets of paper in a folder without any weight on them will stick to each other. If you pry them apart little bits of the sheets of paper touching each other will rip off leaving each sheet of paper with gaps in the text. This cold result in having important documents that are so damaged they might be considered invalid in a court of law.

Ink, especially from pens, will return slightly to a liquid state and will spread out; flow into the plant fibers of the paper distorting each and every word.

This can be a disaster when it comes to signatures as a signature can become so distorted that it is no longer considered valid.

The bottom line is you need a safe, dry and clean place to store important documents and other items that can be damaged by moisture. Good storage facilities, such as Centron Self-Storage which provides document storage in Toronto, also have security measures including computer controlled gated entry, motion detectors and security cameras as well as routine inspections by trained staff members to keep a ‘Human Eye’ on everything.